How Do Young Adults Orchestrate Their Multiple Achievement-Related Goals? Associations of Achievement Goal Orientations With Identity Formation and Goal Appraisals

Young adults strive for multiple achievement goals. Frameworks for achievement goal orientations, personal goals, and identity formation have emphasized the role of goal-specific exploration and commitment in the interpretation of goals. However, researchers have yet to combine these different perspectives in an empirical study. Therefore, to explore the processes involved in the selection of multiple goals, the present study investigated the associations of young adults’ achievement goal orientations (mastery-intrinsic, mastery-extrinsic, performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and work-avoidance orientations) with distinct styles of exploring and committing to goals, by considering different dimensions of identity formation (commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration) and achievement-related personal goal appraisals (commitment, effort, and progress). Latent change score models were applied to a longitudinal sample of ...